King Lear is a very strange play to watch.\u00a0 All of the virtuous characters are banished, disowned or fugitives from justice while all the rest of the characters that aren\u2019t out and out villains are seriously flawed and unable to distinguish good from evil.\u00a0 There is a continuous downward spiral as the evil characters consolidate their positions and everyone else including the hapless Lear ricochet from one disaster to the next.<\/p>\n
I first saw this play back in the 1970s as a Shakespeare in the Park presentation in Central Park with James Earl Jones as Lear.\u00a0 Some extremely timely thunderstorm activity by Mother Nature made for an exciting performance and I have enjoyed the play since.\u00a0 But I will admit that the Storm scene is extremely odd to sit through.\u00a0 Even the actors seem to be slightly at a loss as to how they are supposed to relate to each other during this weird act.<\/p>\n
The 1983 version of King Lear starring Laurence Olivier is a British Television production and it is done on a television sound stage and it has the look of a sound stage made to look like a theater stage.\u00a0 That is not to say that it is badly filmed but rather that it does not have the production values that the budget of a major Hollywood movie can allow.<\/p>\n
The cast in addition to Olivier includes some well-known faces.\u00a0 Lear\u2019s Fool is played by John Hurt.\u00a0 Leo McKern, who American audiences might know from the British import television series \u201cRumpole of the Bailey\u201d plays Gloucester.\u00a0 And if you\u2019re old enough to remember the 1960s spy series \u201cThe Avengers\u201d then you would remember Diana Rigg who here plays one of Lear\u2019s evil daughters (Regan).\u00a0 The rest of the cast is unknown to me but overall, the acting is reasonably good.<\/p>\n
In my opinion, you watch this version for Olivier and to a lesser degree John Hurt.\u00a0 They provide the stand out performances that elevate this above an average television version.\u00a0 It is sad to see how frail Olivier is here.\u00a0 He was 75 years old at the time and in extremely poor health.\u00a0 This was his last attempt at Shakespeare.\u00a0 But he gives the lines their due.\u00a0 He allows Lear to make sense to an audience struggling with this bizarre set of characters and circumstances.\u00a0 He was still a great actor even here at the end of his life.\u00a0 That is not to say that the performance was perfect, although I believe it had more to do with technical problems of a television production.\u00a0 During the Storm scene Lear\u2019s voice is difficult to understand over the wind and rain noises.\u00a0 If the video has captioning then this will not be as big a problem.\u00a0 Also, some of the staging is a little odd to me.\u00a0 The torches that were used during some of the scenes look very odd and I assume this was a limitation of the television cameras used to capture the action.<\/p>\n
Overall, this is not a masterpiece like Olivier\u2019s Hamlet or even a slick commercial production like Henry V that had a robust budget and a great supporting cast.\u00a0 This is a modest production with a mixture of greater and lesser talent.\u00a0 But it is your only chance to see Laurence Olivier as King Lear.\u00a0 If that interests you then you should see it if it is available to you from whatever source you obtain your movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
King Lear is a very strange play to watch.\u00a0 All of the virtuous characters are banished, disowned or fugitives from justice while all the rest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[2590,747,2588,896,890,2589,43,38,1355,295,2363],"class_list":["post-11556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-diana-rigg","tag-england","tag-john-hurt","tag-king-lear","tag-laurence-olivier","tag-leo-mckern","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-shakespeare","tag-shakespeare-in-film"],"yoast_head":"\n